Life cycle management of communications

For organizations and companies, a document retention policy is only as good as their ability to enforce it. Evizone's view on demand design makes it simple to create and enforce company or user defined access and retention policies. The enforcement is an automatic and unavoidable by-product of using Evizone.

Evizone uses the familiar model of exchanging written documents and correspondence among individuals and groups of people focused on a given theme. We refer to this theme as a 'Topic'. Topics contain all documents and messages pertaining to a specific subject matter. In the time is takes to send yet another unsecured email, any Evizone user can instantly create a new topic for the secure transmission and viewing of messages and documents amongst a workgroup. The following image shows how a user can define a life cycle for all of the documents and messages contained within a topic and communicated by the workgroup.

Each topic's life cycle is defined by:

• A publication date on which documents and messages can start to be be sent and viewed. Note: the topic's creator/owner can post documents to the topic ahead of the publication date. These documents will become viewable on the publication date. This makes Evizone quite useful for "data" or "deal" room applications.
• An accessibility period during which topic members can send and view content.
• A retention period during which content can no longer be sent or viewed. After this retention period expires, all of the topic's messages and documents will be permanently deleted.

Evizone's group subscriptions are managed by a Security Manager. The Security Manager can designate both minimum and maximum retention periods; thus ensuring compliance to a defined retention policy.

Life cycle management benefits

Evizone's automated life cycle management of messages and documents provides many benefits:

Manage business risk

Retaining temporary messages and documents longer than required increases the possibility that an errant communication, misinterpreted or misrepresented in a court of law, could lead to a negative outcome to the organization.

Lower the costs of legal discovery

Evizone lowers the costs of legal discovery in two ways. One, since Evizone automatically enforces a retention policy, the volume of messages and documents contained in the discovery record will be greatly reduced. Two, since Evizone automatically organizes communications into topics, the required documents and messages for discovery are easily found and they are already organized.

Protect business critical information

Evizone's view on demand design and life cycle management communications ensures that users can only view information for a designated and controlled period of time. This is ideal when needing to share sensitive information such intellectual property for a short period of time; a patent filing for example. After the accessibility period expires topic members will no longer have access and after the retention period expires, the business critical information will be permanently deleted.